Workplace Learning for Changing Social and Economic Circumstances

At the heart of this book is the rapid pace of change, the need to invest in and create good jobs and support the learning that this entails. It brings together a range of socio-cultural perspectives to examine the hard issues in relation to digitalisation, identity, work design and affordances for learning, mediated by the ecosystems within which work, and the workplace is positioned.

The contributors take a strong social justice perspective that seeks to uncover commonly held assumptions about where the responsibility for workplace learning lies, how to understand workplace learning from a range of different perspectives and what it all means for practitioners and researchers in the field. The first section sets the scene in its theorisation of the role and place of workplace learning in the context of changing circumstances. The second section brings together a rich collection of investigations into workplace learning that address the challenges of rapidly changing circumstances. In the final section, the authors consider what workplace learning in changing circumstances means for change practitioners, the changing roles of human resource practitioners, and for workers and quality work.

This volume will appeal to graduate and post-graduate students, and academics as well as practitioners such as adult educators, and human resource personnel.

Helen Bound is Associate Professor, Institute for Adult Learning at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.

Anne Edwards is Professor Emeritus, Department of Education at the University of Oxford.

Karen Evans is Professor Emeritus, Institute of Education at University College London.

Arthur Chia is Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Ageing Research & Education at Duke-NUS Medical School.